Interim Use at a Former Death Strip? Art, Politics and Urbanism at Skulpturenpark BerlinKaren E. Till

Twenty years after unification Berlin continues to promote the (re)building of the city throughmarketing practices, including tours, white models, viewing platforms, and buildings wrappedwith plastic façades to depict future urban scenes for residents and visitors to imagine.1 Althoughthese strategies of making the city under construction, renovation, deconstruction, andreconstruction into a spectacle were most clearly evident during the first fifteen years of Berlin’spost-unification construction boom, urban landscapes continue to be used as temporal frames tosituate the city in a future to come. In 2006 and 2007, for example, viewing platforms invitedvisitors to look at the scene of the “environmental deconstruction” of the Palast der Republik asplanners, to view a site from an elevated platform and imagine how the future Humboldt Centermight replace this former parliamentary building of the German Democratic Republic (GDR)

Elsewhere in the city, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser excavated threeplots in a series of adjacent empty lots in central Berlin in 2007 and erected viewing platformsthat led down into those sites . Their artistic excavation-installation, Turn it one moretime (2006-08), unearthed building foundations, coal furnaces, cellars, even toilets—remnants ofearlier urban inhabitants. In describing their work, the artists noted that viewing platformserected on the western side of the Berlin Wall after 1961 “allowed citizens to see beyond thedivision. Now, rather than leading upwards, the excavations led downwards and offered a newview into the history of a place.”2 Köbberling and Kaltwasser also observed how the “view” ofthe city from their platforms encouraged visitors to encounter urban natures. The artists listed thediverse array of plants in the overgrown fields they excavated according to their biologicalspecies on a large billboard at the site. For the artists “the stairway [down into the excavation] …provided an experiential path,” bringing viewers into the opened ground “to be surrounded bythe site’s intrinsic, biological processes.”3 When standing on the platform, visitors weresurrounded by layers of earth and the plants just above ground and at eye level. Here they couldwitness “the territorial appropriation [of the city] by wild plants:” “This overwhelming presenceof flora presented the natural potentials of the place typically beyond the interests of its potentialdevelopers.”4

As these artists remind, the urban practice of viewing the city from atop woodenplatforms has a deeply personal as well as political and economic performance history in dividedand post-unified Berlin. Viewing platforms in recent memory were first erected in haphazardfashion by locals to retain some kind of contact between family members and neighborhoodsseparated in 1961. These flimsy structures became associated with memories of loss,displacement, and division for many Berliners. Sturdier viewing edifices were later erected inWest Berlin, changing the emotional politics of viewing to a geopolitical gaze of authority. AsCold War icons of defending Western spaces of “democracy,” the platforms soon also becametourist attractions that promoted the voyeuristic consumption of the (Eastern Bloc) Other and anunderstanding of urban space as transparent. Moreover, at the time that Köbberling andKaltwasser installed Turn it one more time, their inverted use of a platform in Berlin questionedpost-unification viewing practices at construction sites by developers and city authorities.5 Theartists exploited the trope of the platform to challenge the assumption that city planners andpoliticians are the city’s strategic experts, or the all-seeing, masculine surveyors who look at anddefine the world according to national imaginaries, property values, and potential economicdevelopment. Rather than look up at the spectacle of skyscrapers and renovated structures beingbuilt and rebuilt, they asked the viewer to look down into the spaces of land speculation and thento move down into the earth, like a city archaeologist. The platform created an urban encounterof inverted perspectives, reminding us that the act of looking is never neutral but always tied tospecific histories of social practices, institutions, and power relations. The artists questioned theauthoritative gaze as a form of knowing, playing with perceptions of distances and closeness, toconfront the scopic regimes of the state and the city’s institutions for economic and scientificmanagement.6

Köbberling and Kaltwasser’s installation points to the inherent problems of citymarketing strategies. To package landscapes, streetscapes, and even neighborhoods asconsumable scenes treats space and time as bounded entities that can be commodified. Eventhough cities continuously undergo processes of transformation, planning land-use maps, publicpolicies, and even theories of the city represent urban space and life as well as the placesresidents inhabit in static terms. In contrast, the artists invited residents and passersby to explore,envision, remember, and create new ways of encountering their city, past and present.As architectural historian Dolores Hayden argues, little scholarly work documents thechanges, losses, and new designs of particular places in cities that may resonate in the collectivememory of local residents.7 And yet the experiences, memories, and desires of residents andvisitors offer a complex repository of understanding “urbanism as a way of life,” to borrow urbansociologist Louis Wirth’s oft-cited 1938 essay.8 If urban designers, the building professionals,and urban theorists are serious about producing socially sustainable cities and communities in thefuture, they must acknowledge that residents are the caretakers of urban places. As I suggest inthis chapter, planners as well as scholars have much to learn from locally based artists who haveexperimented with a range of participatory and transformative approaches to engage residents inrepresenting and defining their city and the places and neighborhoods they inhabit. At the sametime artistic interventions offer residents creative practices that encourage an appreciation of thefragility of the social ecologies of place. As I have argued elsewhere, such nuanced interactionsand attitudes may also result in the development of a place-based ethics of care in the context ofa city that has experienced a violent national past and dramatic urban change.9

In this chapter I focus on projects such as Turn it one more time curated by the artisticcollaborative Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum that have emerged as a direct consequence of thedivided city and are located in the shadow of the former Berlin Wall in one of the city’s former“death strips” in Berlin Mitte. In what appeared to be an empty, overgrown lot in an isolated yetcentrally located part of the city, artists worked in and through this post-Wall space,appropriating the materials and spatial practices of city-building professionals including mediaimages, buildings, streets, and parcels of land, while questioning how land development andurban use in the “new” Berlin ignored the legacies of a once divided city. Rather than treatingspace as an empty container to be filled in or emptied out, they began with an understanding ofthe city as constituted by inhabited places that intersect with other complex places.10 Theirartistic matter mobilized the stray stuff, remnants, leftovers, unwanted forms, and seeminglyempty lots of the city (including the “death strips”), to create what I call “interim spaces”through which non-normative, critical spatial and historical imaginaries of the city could beexplored. Their work invited encounters with the city as an enacted environment, and askedvisitors and locals to take notice of the complex ways places are made and remade.11 Tounderstand how these artists, visitors, and residents engaged with the projects, I first consider themore general post-unification marketing and planning contexts of their work.From Zwischennutzung to Interim Spaces.

In 2008 Berlin’s Mayor Klaus Wowereit launched a new image campaign for the city under theslogan “Be Berlin” (Sei Berlin). As urban sociologists Claire Columb and Ares Kalandidesasked, “Why does it still matter for Berlin’s political leaders to search for a new image, a newslogan, a new ‘brand’ twenty years after the fall of the Wall and the reunification of the city?”12They noted not only that the “New Berlin” marketing strategy was not so new by this point intime, but also that the city did not appear to be functioning well economically. Although the“creative industries” sector appears to be strong, such as in music, design, and art, the city-state(Land) of Berlin has nearly faced bankruptcy, so that the public sector has had to rely heavily onprivate funding and public-private partnerships. Columb further argues that the “Be Berlin”marketing campaign and the recent “Urban Pioneers” project of the Berlin Senate’s Office ofUrban Development appear to be capitalizing on local, spontaneous projects at seemingly vacantplots, that is, in spaces planners and large-scale developers normally consider economicallyirrelevant.13 She also mentions that in addition to publishing a “how to” book about managingunderutilized urban spaces for developers, cultural event planners, and local neighborhoodauthorities, the Berlin Senate Office provides the following services: webpage inventories ofavailable properties for temporary use; management assistance for building and constructiongaps owned by public agencies; the coordination of a Berlin-wide database of vacant plotsawaiting redevelopment; and funding for small consultancies that mediate between owners andso-called “temporary users.”14

City authorities refer to this “new” planning concept as Zwischennutzung or temporaryuse. The formal recognition and management of so-called urban wastelands—includingbrownfield and former industrial sites (unused sites that may have high levels of environmentalpollution from former uses), unused buildings, and vacant plots and buildings resulting fromdivision, war damage, erasures by successive political regimes, poor planning, and the disuse ofinfrastructure—are actually radical for any city or state planning agency. Yet in the internationalurban management context defined by Richard Florida’s persuasive rhetoric about thesignificance of the “creative class” to urban economic growth, the notion of “temporary use” by“urban pioneers” in the “creative city” appears to be a new planning fad in Berlin, similar toother cities searching for a way to become competitive and establish an economically basedidentity.15 Although many local residents are cynical about the ways in which seeminglyredundant spaces in the city are being claimed by city authorities under the label ofZwischennutzung, Berlin does make a contribution to how urban space might be theorized andeven “mapped.”